I know that most people have their yearly resolutions in January…the New Year and all…well I don’t really subscribe to that. I seem to make my resolutions throughout the year. Anyways, this year I am hoping to really push myself. Recently a few life changes have made me feel like I need to seize the moment more, better myself more often and be the best darn person I can be. So I figured that the way I would go about my resolutions this year is by tackling the things that I’m afraid of, like writing. Crazy, right?
You’re probably asking yourself how someone who writes a blog can be afraid of writing. Well, the reason I’m afraid of it is that I don’t think I’m very good at it. My writing ability is usually the biggest reason why I end up giving up on my blogs. I have about 40 potential blog posts saved as drafts right now and I’m too afraid to actually press the ‘Publish’ button. To be honest, it’s really frightening. For as long as I can remember, I have never liked to share my writings, essays, poems, even my own thoughts. Mostly because I have so many thoughts running around my head at one time and sometimes most of the time, I have absolutely no way of communicating them properly…you know in a ‘well thought out and perfectly acceptable in English’ manner…. kinda sucks. And if you think that is bad, ask me how I manage to interact with people….actually, I’ll save that one for another day. haha.
So writing, yeah. I’m not a very confident writer. I also figured out I was dyslexic later in my life, which explained a lot of things. When I was younger, I absolutely, positively, hated reading out loud in class. Most people think that people who are gifted with dyslexia write their 9’s backward or ‘5’s become ‘S’s. I’m here to tell you that that is a load of donkey poop. Whenever I would read something, and it still happens nowadays I’ve just learned to adapt to it, I would see half words, or I wouldn’t see certain words on the page, or best of all I would see other words that looked just like a word that was actually written down. It was confusing as a kid and I never really had a teacher sit down and ask me what I saw. Their solution was to keep picking me in class for reading, thinking that I just needed to read out loud some more and that my shyness was the problem. Something they didn’t realize, was that I was overly shy because I was so embarrassed and felt so stupid reading and writing. It felt as though I was this oddball among my classmates. To make matters worse, I didn’t know it was dyslexia until I was in my late 20’s, but by then a lot of the damage was done. I would get super anxious if I knew that a class involved reading out loud to a group of people. Sounding words out doesn’t really work for me. That whole lesson on what C and H sound like together didn’t make sense to me at all, I just couldn’t process the letter sounds properly. To this day, I still have problems sounding words out and it really comes down to trying to mimic how someone else has said that word.
To make matters worse, my dyslexia included writing issues. I became very hesitant to get anyone to edit my writings because it always felt as though I was so behind my peers’ abilities. Anytime I would edit someone else’s piece of writing, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be a good editor. It would take me twice as long to edit work. Weird, right? So yeah, writing, reading out loud (I love reading books by myself, though), and editing, are all areas I need major work on, mostly for my own sake. It’s not like I can’t write an essay or read or edit, I did well in university and college and graduated with honours, I just adapted given the circumstances.
So in an effort to get better at it, I have decided that I’ll be doing more writing. I’ve picked up a new writing prompts book to help me write more, and I’m thinking of taking a few creative writing courses at my local college. Besides that, I will be writing a hell of a lot more on my blog. I hope you’ll join me.
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